Journal articles on the topic 'Libretto opera series'

<p>Bolesław Wallek Walewski był jedną z czołowych postaci krakowskiego życia muzycznego w okresie międzywojennym. Do jego najwybitniejszych dzieł należy opera <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em>, której libretto jest kontynuacją <em>Halki</em> Stanisława Moniuszki. W artykule scharakteryzowano muzyczne związki pomiędzy obu operami, widoczne m.in. we wprowadzeniu przez Wallek Walewskiego cytatów motywów z <em>Halki</em>, a także wskazano różnice stylistyczne między obydwoma dziełami. Wyznaczają je trzy elementy: warstwa językowa librett, główne założenia dramaturgiczne oraz styl muzyczny. Libretto <em>Halki</em> napisane zostało przez W. Wolskiego bez aluzji do elementów gwarowych, natomiast B. Wallek Walewski w libretcie <em>Pomsty Jontkowej</em> wykorzystał w szerokim zakresie gwarę podhalańską. W przeciwieństwie do <em>Halki</em>, osią dramatu Wallek Walewskiego jest motyw zemsty górala na możnych panach. Styl muzyczny opery Walewskiego wykazuje pokrewieństwo z muzyką Wagnera, z nurtem muzycznego folkloryzmu (poprzez nawiązanie do folkloru podhalańskiego), oraz impresjonizmu. W artykule poruszono ponadto problem recepcji dzieła. <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em> była najbardziej znanym i często wystawianym w Polsce dziełem operowym krakowskiego kompozytora. Jej prapremiera odbyła się w Teatrze Wielkim w Poznaniu w 1926 roku. Na przełomie lat dwudziestych i trzydziestych opera ta cieszyła się w Polsce dużą popularnością, wystawiły ją także inne teatry operowe w kraju (z wyjątkiem sceny warszawskiej). Po II wojnie światowej <em>Pomstę Jontkową</em> wystawiła Opera Wrocławska.</p><p>SUMMARY</p><p>Born in Lvov but fi rst of all associated with the musical circles in Krakow, Bolesław Wallek Walewski (1885-1944) referred to one of Stanisław Moniuszko’s most famous operas – <em>Halka</em> [Helen] – when composing his own opera Pomsta Jontkowa [Jontek’s Vengeance] (1924). The contemporaries regarded Halka and Pomsta Jontkowa as a series. Both operas share common elements: <em>Halka</em> (Warsaw version) and <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em> are four-act operas, the same characters appear in their librettos (Jontek, Zofia), and in both works the confl icts between the gentry and the peasants are highly important. The musical connections between the operas are evidenced by Walewski’s use of the leading motifs. Moreover, both in <em>Halka</em> and in <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em>, there are highlanders’ dances. Walewski also includes melodies from Halka into his work.</p><p>The principal difference between the two operas is determined by three elements: the language of the librettos, the main dramatic assumptions, and the musical style. The libretto of <em>Halka</em> was written by Włodzimierz Wolski (1824-1882) without references to dialectal elements whereas Walewski liberally used the Podhale highlanders’ dialect in his libretto. Moreover, unlike <em>Halka</em>, which emphasizes the personal experiences of the main heroine and social confl icts, the axis of Walewski’s drama is the motif of the highlander’s revenge on the wealthy lords. The musical style of <em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em> shows, on the one hand, a similarity with Richard Wagner’s music (harmony, instrumentation, and the way of treatment of leitmotifs), while on the other – a similarity to the trend of musical folklorism and impressionism. An innovative idea is the combination of impressionist features with the stylization of highlanders’ folklore.</p><p><em>Pomsta Jontkowa</em> was the best known opera of the Krakow composer in Poland in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and at the same time it was one of the most original Polish operas of the interwar period. It combines traditional elements with modern ones, and it is an expression of the late inspirations by Wagnerian music and esthetics in Polish music, as well as referring to the best traditions of the Polish national opera.</p>

Pavel Haas' only opera Šarlatán (The Charlatan), composed in 1934-1937, is the composer's most extensive work and in many ways the culmination of his interwar output. The creation of The Charlatan was preceded by a series of plans and unfinished opera attempts, but these mostly failed in negotiations with the authors of the subjects. These included Stanislav Lom's play Kající Venuše (Penitent Venus), Karel Čapek's Loupežník (The Robber) and Salomon Anski's Dybbuk. In 1932 Haas also negotiated about a libretto for an opera with the poet Vítězslav Nezval. Sometime around this time, probably during the summer months of 1933, Pavel Haas got his hands on a novel by the German writer Josef Winckler, Doctor Eisenbart, which he decided to adapt as an opera. The newly discovered correspondence of Pavel Haas from 1933–1934, addressed to Josef Winckler, helps to reveal the reasons that complicated the negotiations between the artists. Due to the political situation in Hitler's Germany, the negotiations did not reach a final agreement, so Pavel Haas, who himself had adapted the libretto from the novel, had to conceal the name of the author of the novel's subject during the premiere production in Brno in April 1938.

“At the time and in the place of the action.” This is the tagline of a series of opera broadcasts transmitted live on European television. Each is shot in the locations depicted in the opera, its broadcast staggered so that each act airs at the time of day specified in the libretto. What are the material and performative implications of this overdetermined authenticity of time and place, this mediatized encounter between opera stage and reality TV?

The opera Telemaco, with a libretto by Marco Coltellini and music by Christoph Gluck, occupies a unique position as an opera seria that negotiates both tradition and reform. Scholars have long criticized the opera because of its ill-shaped libretto and uneven musical setting. This article contributes to the ongoing debate about operatic reform by reevaluating Telemaco based on its literary sources—Homer’s Odyssey and Fénelon’s novel Télémaque (1699). The absorption of Homer and Fénelon into the fabric of Telemaco goes well beyond adaptation, touching both its general dramaturgy and the specific creation of its characters. Set on the island of Circe, Coltellini's libretto echoes the timeless, liminal status of the corresponding islands (Circe’s and Calypso’s) found in Homer and Fénelon. The characters reflect and blend features of their literary counterparts. They fall into two groups: those who fight their captive condition through impetuous behavior (Circe and Telemachus) and those who attempt to circumvent their predicament by clinging to a golden past (Asteria) or yearning for a hopeful future (Ulysses’s desire to return home). Gluck’s expression of the characters’ longing and identity, achieved through a manipulation of form and textual re-composition, thus implies multiple temporal directions, suggesting a series of synchronic, revolving points of view that challenge the diachronic unfolding of events typically associated with opera reform in the eighteenth century. This method of analysis therefore offers insight into the creative process and helps refine our understanding of reformist opera, both in Gluck’s output and broader eighteenth-century operatic practice.

This column includes reviews of two women composers, American Gwyneth Walker (b. 1947) and Pole Grazyna Bacewicz (1909–1969.) The song anthologies presented are Walker’s “No Ordinary Women!” and Bacewicz’ twelve songs, the only ones published. The opera aria anthology series OperAria has released a new book in their series for lyric tenor, an important new collection that combines arias and range, fach, libretto information and provenance, performance history, and descriptions of the vocal/technical and stylistic.

Statement of the problem. Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, in reality, Wilhelm von Habsburg, who consciously embraced the Ukrainian identity and fought for Ukraine’s independence during the First and Second World Wars, captivates the attention of prominent scholars and Ukrainian artists since the final decades of the 20th century. The 2000s marked a real renaissance in interest toward this enigmatic Austrian by origin, yet Ukrainian by spirit, that is evidenced by numerous historical, literary, and music works created during the first two decades of the 21st century. Among the most significant are the study by American historian T. Snyder, “The Red Prince” (2008); N. Sniadanko’s novel, “The Neat Manuscripts of Archduke Wilhelm” (2017); and A. Zahaikevych’s opera, “Vyshyvanyi. The King of Ukraine” (2021), with a libretto by S. Zhadan. The operatic portrayal of the Austrian archduke by S. Zhadan and A. Zahaikevych was preceded by N. Sniadanko’s novel with fantasy elements. In literature, the artistic freedom to reinterpret historical events is permissible, as it serves as a means of artistic generalization. A similar approach is seen in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series (1990s), which draws inspiration from England’s Wars of the Roses. The principle of mythologizing history (per O. Roschenko), established in both literature and opera well before A. Zahaikevych’s opera is intrinsic to Romantic culture. In contrast to the historical factuality presented in T. Snyder’s book, the opera and Sniadanko’s novel employ a fusion of the fictional and the real. The divergence between Sniadanko’s imaginative narrative and factual history becomes evident when comparing “The Neat Manuscripts of Archduke Wilhelm” with T. Snyder’s “The Red Prince”. Objectives, methods and novelty of the research. The purpose of the research is to identify the historical and artistic preconditions for interpreting the image of Vasyl Vyshyvanyi in A. Zahaikevych’s opera (2021). The research based on the principle of historicism, the historical-biographical, historical-contextual, and comparative approaches are used. The novelty of the study lies in identificity of the unique artistic interpretation of the Vasyl Vyshyvanyi’s image in N. Sniadanko’s novel based on the romantic principle of mythologizing biography as a sourse of the libretto of A. Zahaikevych’s opera. Results and conclusion. A comprehensive analysis of N. Sniadanko’s novel demonstrates that understanding Vasyl Vyshyvanyi’s phenomenon in modern Ukrainian literature occurs through the lens of mythologizing historical events and personalities. This approach is entirely valid, as Vyshyvanyi’s name has entered the pantheon of Ukrainian heroes. The metaphorical richness inherent in Sniadanko’s novel also manifests significantly in the libretto of the opera, transforming the latter into an “opera-novel” with several plans of action and romanticizing of the protagonist. Mythologizing, romanticizing, and psychological trends enhance the cinematic quality of S. Zhadan’s libretto, so A. Zahaikevych’s opera is perceived less as a drama (à la Wagner) and more as a novel. N. Sniadanko’s extensive use of artistic fiction in depicting V. Vyshyvanyi’s image becomes apparent when comparing her fictional character with the historical prototype presented in T. Snyder’s documentary book “The Red Prince” (2008). Understanding the “pathways” taken by Sniadanko and Snyder regarding the controversial events of the early 21st century reveals their influence on the composer’s interpretation of the opera’s main character – Wilhelm Habsburg.

A key feature of the study of Russian opera has been its interest in ‘page-tostage’ adaptation of canonical works of literature. Behind this research story, in many respects, there is only the fact that a significant number of Russian operas are really based on literary primary sources. The contribution of philologists who have studied this subject on a par with specialists in the history of music also played a role in its credibility. This logocentric approach overlooks, however, another tradition, one in which the libretto is the product of a negotiation between agents and where the relationship between the source text and operatic adaptation is attenuated. The work that most fully subverts the ‘pageto-stage’ tradition and fully incorporates the librettist as a co-creator of the finished composition is The Rake’s Progress, with music by Igor Stravinsky and words by Wystan Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman. It may seem eccentric to see The Rake’s Progress as a Russian opera, yet as this chapter argues, it is certainly an opera shaped by aspects of Stravinsky’s Russian origins, upbringing, and education, and somehow spoken ‘in translation’. In particular, it engages in a series of intertextual dialogues with the legacy of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.

One of Canada’s most famous opera productions recently returned to the stage of the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto after an eight-year odyssey of touring that has brought the Canadian Opera Company acclaim from critics around the world. First mounted in Toronto in 1993, Robert Lepage’s staging of Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung has travelled to New York, Edinburgh (where it won the prestigious £50 000 Scotsman Hamada prize for drama and music), Melbourne, Geneva, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Cincinnati. As is by now well-known, Lepage bases his theatrical creation on the use of “resources,” ranging from pieces of text to familiar objects to artistic images in other media. What is striking in his stage direction of these two short operas, restaged for this production by François Racine, is the way Lepage treats the music itself as a resource. In this staging it would seem that the musical patterns of the score guide the creation of a series of visual images much more than do the verbal signs of the libretto. The result is a complex presentation of visual and aural images that strikes the audience as fantastically original without ultimately challenging the rather traditional messages of these psychoanalytically inspired operas.

The Lobkowicz Library and Archives preserve important materials that illuminate the musical sphere of Franz Joseph Maximilian, 7th Prince Lobkowitz (1772–1816). Though his patronage of Beethoven has been widely recognized and well documented, Lobkowitz's cultivation of opera productions in house theatres within his Bohemian and Vienna palaces, and his support of opera composers and singers, form a fascinating and little known part of his musical activity. This essay examines one particular opera, Leonora, ossia l'Amor conjugale, by Ferdinando Paër, which received a series of performances in the Lobkowitz house theatre in Vienna during the spring of 1806. A valuable trove of production documents, including account records from stage designer Lorenzo Sacchetti, costumer Lucas Piazza, and Lobkowitz Kapellmeister Anton Wranitzky, allows us to reconstruct the narrative of this opera's earliest performances in Vienna, and its connections to another opera based on the same libretto, Beethoven's Leonore (later Fidelio), presented during precisely the same period. Surviving manuscripts that include the opera's score and original performing parts, as well as Lobkowitz family letters, also contribute vital information.

AbstractThe world of opera is well known as a professional community in which egos often clash, yet the complexity of the operatic artwork is often heavily dependent on collaborative practice. This article discusses the co-creative dynamics that gave rise to the premiere production of the comic opera Je suis narcissiste, by composer Raquel García-Tomás, librettist Helena Tornero and stage director Marta Pazos. Through a series of interviews with this artistic team, and a scrutiny of the libretto, score and documentary video recording of its premiere, three significant features of this collaboration are flagged, particularly in Act VIII. These are: a quest for balance in the convergence of the disciplines involved; a mitigation of undesired redundancies in the representation of some elements in the action of the opera; a consideration of the capacity of the human and material resources available for the premiere. The article will also discuss how these anticipatory strategies helped to optimise time during rehearsals.

В центре исследования находится моноопера Фараджа Караева «Journey to love», рассмотренная в аспекте жанрового синтеза и особенностей организации – как внешней, обусловленной структурой либретто, так и внутренней, детерминированной серийными и иными закономерностями. Проанализированы особенности авторской работы с серией, представлены схемы, иллюстрирующие порождающую функцию исходного ряда и конструктивную функцию серийных преобразований в масштабе всего сочинения. Сделан вывод о знаковости монооперы и типообразующем значении её характеристик в контексте творчества композитора. The research focuses on Faraj Karaev's mono-opera “Journey to love” in the aspect of genre synthesis and organizational features – both external, defined by the structure of the libretto, and internal, determined by serial and other patterns. The features of the author's work with the series are analyzed; the schemes that illustrate the generating function of the original series and the constructive function of the serial transformations on the scale of the entire work are presented. The conclusion is made about the significance of the mono-opera and the type-forming importance of its characteristics in the context of the composer's work.

The intrinsic spirituality of Arrigo Boito’s art in the opera Mefistofele results from the vibrant expressions of the sacred that directly accompany the tumultuous path of the Faustian quests. The present article highlights the way in which the composer penetrates through music and text into the metaphysical mysteries of the fight between good and evil, in the scene of Faust’s salvation – the Epilogue. The violent confrontation of the antagonistic forces of the universe takes place when Faust, at the end of his life, manages to free himself from Mefistofele. The musical, literary and scenic means of expression imposed by the composer – being the sole creator of the libretto, music and mise-en-scène – masterfully reproduce this confrontation. The fragment we analyzed emphasizes this by noting at the same time how metaphysical space can be rendered with the help of music. Placed at the end of the opera Mefistofele, through the dramatic unfolding rich in sacred symbols, the scene of salvation crowns the series of defining elements with which Boito contributes to the evolution of the Faustian myth. Keywords: Mefistofele, Epilogue, Boito, Faust, Sacred.

В статье рассматривается опыт межкультурной коммуникации, реализуемый на примере оперы Дж. Пуччини и ее китайских версий. Внимание на «китайском следе» в данном художественном образце, позволяет констатировать, что именно эта последняя опера итальянского мастера стала точкой отсчета в межкультурной коммуникации Запада и Востока, завершая череду творений композитора, в которых обращение к отличным от итальянской культуры традициям обогатило мировое художественное наследие. Сосредоточение научного интереса на сычуаньской опере «Принцесса Турандот» (1993) композитора Ляо Чжунжун (либретто Вэй Минлунь) и опере «Турандот» (2008) в постановке Чэнь Синьи, финал к которой написал композитор Хао Вэйя, выявляет общее и особенное в опыте межкультурной коммуникации как согласование противоречий, имманентно присущее западной и восточной культурным традициям. The article examines the experience of intercultural communication, realized using G. Puccini's opera and its Chinese versions as an example. Focusing on the “Chinese footprint” in this artistic sample, the author arrives at the conclusion that it was this last opera by the Italian master that became the starting point in the intercultural communication of the West and East. This opera completed a series of works by the composer, in which the appeal to traditions different from Italian culture enriched the world artistic heritage. Focusing his scientific interest on the Sichuan opera “Princess Turandot” (1993) by Liao Zhongrong (libretto by Wei Minglun) and the opera “Turandot” (2008) directed by Chen Xinyi, the finale of which was written by the composer Hao Wei, the author reveals the general and the special in the experience of intercultural communication as a reconciliation of contradictions immanently inherent in Western and Eastern cultural traditions.

Statement of the problem. On October 1–2, 2021, the premiere performances of A. Zahaikevych’s opera “Vyshyvanyi. King of Ukraine” based on S. Zhadan’s libretto took place at the Kharkiv Opera Theater. It is a multifaceted art project that contained several equal components – music, printing of the opera libretto, advertising company, stage design, costume, use of video effects; one of the few modern Ukrainian opera works, which was written to order and perhaps the first Ukrainian opera, written in such a modern musical language. The purpose of this article is a scientific understanding of the process of creation and presentation of A. Zahaikevych’s opera. A combination of methods of generalization and systematization of information presented by several critical essays fixed the immediate impressions of the performance, as well as the method of interpretive analysis aimed at understanding the author’s idea of the musical work and the specifics of its presentation is applied. Results and conclusion. The purpose of creating the opera was an artistic presentation of the new modern Ukrainian nation. The fate of Vasyl Vyshyvanyi attracted the attention of the authors as it allows drawing parallels between the events of the present and the past. In the imaginary space of the opera, historical figures whose voices are “heard” by Vyshyvanyi are presented. A series of memories forms the dramatic structure of the work, revealing to the viewer the events that influenced the course of history. Awareness of a significant of fateful choice of the people, who even today, almost 100 years after the events that became the plot of the opera, choose the right to self-determination, define the importance of mass scenes. Choir and ballet artists appear before the audience sometimes as refugees, then as hunters, cadets, soldiers, people at the train station, revealing and commenting on the context of the events. Thanks to the juxtaposition of live and electro-acoustic sound, A. Zahaikevych achieved the embodiment of a wide range of human emotions and voices, although the performance of vocal parts posed very unusual tasks for the soloists. Playing the role of the Man in Black, for the first time I encountered the need to sing in the Sprechstimme technique, paying attention to the conversational character of the vocal part, which is formed by the use of small durations, dotted rhythm and syncopation, the interweaving of three-part pulsation with two-part, numerous pauses between words and even syllables, the use of whispering and falsetto singing, tonal uncertainty. The composer also provides for the use of microphones, which allows to enrich the palette of vocal means of expression and to densify the musical texture by means of electronic processing of the sound of vocal parts. Most of the time, the actors of the opera are in the depth of the stage on a huge metal structure with a total weight of 5 tons. It is divided into three tiers, which evokes associations with the Ukrainian “Vertep” folk theater. When you are on the third tier, the distance to the conductor is about 20 meters, which makes it much more difficult to perform stage tasks. That is why it is necessary to mention Yuriy Yakovenko, the conductor of the spectacle, whose highly professional work determined the success of the premiere. To summarize, the premiere performances of the opera “Vyshyvanyi. King of Ukraine”, without exaggeration, became a landmark event, bringing together musical figures from many cities of Ukraine. For all participants of the project, it became an extremely interesting and useful experience of rethinking the stable canons of perception of opera art.

In 1953 there was a projected collaboration between Dylan Thomas and Igor Stravinsky: an opera whose libretto was to be written by the poet and set to music by the composer. Unfortunately, due to Thomas’s death that same year, this plan never materialised. The aim of this article is to offer a detailed exploration of the context within which this project originated and what it entailed for the poet, especially in relation to the direction where Thomas’s work was taking him before his death. The opera with Stravinsky could have been the culmination of the poet’s work inasmuch as it brought together his love of sound, rhythm and music, the horror of the war, his fascination with language and the near-extinction of human life. Moreover, the artists were able to exchange a series of letters before Thomas’s death. The second contribution of our article is the publication of Stravinsky’s letters to Thomas, which have not been previously published. Whilst the narrative of their encounters and relationship has been shaped in certain ways by different writers, a close examination of the primary source materials—the accounts of friends, the content of the letters and the circumstances in which they were written help shed light on this highly promising, but uncompleted, project.

Abstract Among a community of Italian political leaders and artists who settled in Paris after the failed Italian revolutions of 1831 was Count Carlo Pepoli, author of the libretto for Bellini's I puritani. During his years in Paris, Pepoli also wrote the poetry for two song collections: Rossini's Soiréées musicales and Mercadante's Soiréées italiennes. Both collections are conceived as a series of picturesque images of Italian locales interspersed with pastoral scenes; they are also linked by allusions to a character named Elvira, perhaps a projection of the heroine of I puritani. This article explores the connections between the Rossini and Mercadante songs and their possible link to Bellini's opera, in relation to two distinct audiences: the Parisian salons of the 1830s, with their strong Italian expatriate presence, and the market of amateurs who purchased sheet music. In both contexts, the poetic content and musical style of the songs may have fostered favorable attitudes to Italy and to Unification, showing that even music composed for private and domestic uses could be politically influential.

The article presents a complex history of the opera The Legend of the Baltic to a libretto of Waleria Szalay-Groele which enjoyed great popularity already during Feliks Nowowiejski’s lifetime. The author argues that subsequent versions of the opera, made by the composer since its successful world premiere in Poznań in 1924, were, at least partially, a result of unfavorable criticism, not devoid of nationalistic traits, expressed or inspired by a respected ethnomusicologist Łucjan Kamieński, his adversary from the time of Berlin studies under Max Bruch. On the other hand, the new edition of the final scene, allegedly prepared in 1941, ignoring a precise combination of leitmotifs of the two main characters – Doman and Bogna, which became a pillar of the new version of the score popular during the communist period, was, in fact, a mystification made by the sons of Nowowiejski who decided to bring their father’s work closer to the ideals of socialist realism. A final, author’s version of The Legend of the Baltic was then prepared personally by Nowowiejski for the inauguration of the 1939/1940 season at Grand Theatre in Poznań; however, due to the outbreak of war, the score was not performed during his lifetime. It was only in 2017 that the score was reconstructed by Marcin Gmys and published as part of the series “Works of Felix Nowowiejski” by the Polish Music Publishing House. This edition of the opera, when compared with its inauthentic post-war version, restores not only the original, final scene but also, among other elements, the original arrangement of three acts of 1938 with Act II being a compact ballet scene taking place at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. It is worth emphasizing that after World War II, for many years, the music for Act II in a shortened, purely instrumental version gained great popularity as an alleged overture to Act I of the opera.

The main goal of this publication is to draw the attention of musicologists and the general music community to the rich creative heritage of Mark Karminskyi, whose 90th anniversary is celebrated in 2020. One of the milestone works of the talented composer was the opera “Ten Days That Shook the World” (1970). Staged at one time by several theaters in the former USSR and abroad, it was later practically forgotten. The author of this article is the first to deeply analyze Karminskyi’s score, coming to the conclusion that the composer has an innovative understanding of the very nature of the opera genre, and that this and other works of a great master should be analyzed and evaluated outside any ideological context. The research results. The uniqueness of Karminskyi’s opera “Ten Days That Shook the World” (1970) consists primarily in the fact that the maximum concentration of conflict-dramatic tension was achieved here. This concentration is due to a well-executed libretto (V. Dubrovskyi), which was also quite unique for its time. The fact is that the whole text is based on fragments from the book by John Reed, manifestos, leaflets, telegrams of 1917, speeches and letters by Lenin, as well as epitaphs of the field of Mars. During the free assemblage of the selected material, a completely independent literary canvas was formed. Based on specific documents, the authors sought to identify and emphasize the exciting dramatic pathos of the historical moment being recreated. That is why the libretto includes the most compressed, elastic in rhythm, explosive in meaning phrases, replicas, individual words. The final design of the selected texts went along the line of additional dynamization, strengthening of their “shock” impact. Total documentation and open journalistic verbal canvas led to a completely innovative interpretation of the genre. Here the principles of the grand historical opera were revived, but they were revived in a kind of transcendental version, which needs of gigantic artistic forces. Based on such a performing foundation, an attempt is made to recreate the colossal scale of revolutionary events. The leading musical image is conceived as a symbol of the inevitable course of History, a kind of pendulum of the revolution (in the performance of the Prague national theatre, the pendulum has become an important attribute of scenography). In various intonation and tempo variations, it permeates the opera as a whole in the full sense of the word, preserving unconditional recognition (primarily due to the constant rhythm and jerky articulation). This motif is one of the expressions of the “motor” of the revolution, for the materialization of which imitations of the active knocking of various mechanisms are used, all kinds of toccate formulas are reproduced. With the introduction of the noted motor layer, the atmosphere of sound documentary, so characteristic of this opera, is established. Another major musical reality of the revolutionary era is associated with all kinds of signaling – communicative, notifying, summoning, imperative. The composer does not seek to disguise the nature of this semantic layer and often emphasizes it using in its most elementary quality. The third component of the documentary – sound element is all sorts of orchestral tremoli (mainly in the lower register). In terms of meaning, their amplitude extends from describing the “subsoil” of what is happening (dull rumbling, unclear noise) to recreating the pictures of the raging flow of Time (violent seething, catastrophic bubbling). In any of its manifestations, with the introduction of this tool, different degrees of tension are poured into the sound wave. Defining for the dramaturgy of the opera “leitmotif of struggle” absorbs and transmits in the most generalized forms the characteristic for the documentaryjournalistic style of this work oratorical declamation, invocatory signaling and energy tremolo including the conflict tone of the main dissonance (here – the small second). In the marked lays of documentary-sound atmosphere, as a rule, the main energy of conflict is concentrated. Constant intonation-rhythmic and texture-dynamic injections of this energy give the dramatic movement a special purposefulness of the incessant “tidal” wobble. In turn, these forces themselves are subordinated to the determining regularity of compositional development: the increase in the activity of the life search, transmitted in procedural forms (on the basis of recitation), ends with the acquisition of the resulting state (on support of a bright melodic relief). Naturally, the highest degree of conflict is achieved in those scenes where there is a direct clash of the forces of revolution and counterrevolution. In music there is an extremely colorful, tense documentary-sound environment in which the clash of views, opinions, and positions is unfolding. The full magnitude of the social conflict is revealed in a kind of freeze-frames, where the initiative goes to the orchestra and the “oratorio” choir. In such cases, the narrative rises above the local soil, the musical and journalistic document acquires the comprehensive fullness of the epic canvas about the national movement, and the specific scenic and event series fits into the monumental frame of the oratorical frescoes. This generalizing plan, which at first seems to be accompanying, framing, in fact turns out to be leading in terms of volume and its centralizing role. In “Ten Days” not only the powerful offensive and dramatic potential of the revolutionary movement is recreated, but also its deep soil, the decisive component, is revealed by artistic means: it gained a powerful force and became truly ineradicable due to the support of the masses. This idea permeates the entire ideological structure of the work, since many oratorical episodes represent the personification of the voice of the people. As a result of the analysis of the opera “Ten Days that Shook the World”, we note the following. – The score in a concentrated manner expresses the current tendencies of large-scale opera drama, in particular, the revival of the genre of large historical opera based on the material of the revolutionary era, the defining features of which are realized in forms sustained in modern style. – The music embodies an exceptional conflict-dramatic tension and high civic pathos, which fully corresponds to the ideas about the character of that time.

Background. The children’s opera in all its diversity has undergone a rapid path to its formation and development, responding to changes in the art and aesthetic space of musical culture. The active being and the practical use of this phenomenon only emphasize the gaps in musicology science more acutely. Some researchers combine with the notion of «children’s opera» both works that involve children to participate in the performing process, and those which are aimed at a certain age audience. Other authors put the term «opera for children» as universal, but use it to describe various works. However, if the information about this genre is contained in the scientifi c literature, research on opera for children-performers analogue, children’s operetta which was formed and used by considerable demand in the late 19th – in the fi rst half of the 20th century in the English-speaking countries, is practically absent. This determines the relevance of the chosen subject. Objectives. The objective of this study is to consider the features of the libretto, the compositional and dramaturgical properties of the children’s operetta by J. L. Gaynor The House that Jack Built as one of the English-language samples of the genre. Methods. So far these methods were been applied: historical, structural and functional, comparative. Results. It is diffi cult to indicate the exact date of the children’s operetta emergence. It is known from available literature that it became widespread in the 1880s. In the following decades, the popularity of children’s operettas does not fade, rather, it only grows. The school authorities even were worried about such an intensity of extracurricular work. However, this fact did not affect the number of performances. There are books containing instructions and guidance, tips on probable diffi culties that could be faced by fi rst-time directors. In particular, it was recommended to divide responsibilities between school departments and draw up a general plan of action. Attention was paid to organizing an advertising campaign to attract as many viewers as possible. With such performance enthusiasm, there was a certain lack of repertoire written specifi cally for children and adolescents. Not surprisingly, the music teachers sought to replenish it. Among them was an American piano and harmony teacher Jessie Lovel Smith Gaynor (1863–1921) who composed The House that Jack Built (1902). This is not the only sample of children’s operetta in the heritage of J. L. Gaynor, she wrote a few more works, mostly after fairy tales: The Lost Princess Bo-Peep (its plot matches Jack’s one), The Toy Shop, Snow White, The Magic Wheel, Three Wishes, The Return of Proserpina, and On Plymouth Rock. The libretto of The House that Jack Built, written by A. G. D. Riley, is compiled on the basis of nursery rhymes, which are an integral part of the English-speaking countries culture. The operetta includes 24 folklore texts (full or fragmented): poems, two counters, and a ballad. To organize the plot, the librettist used the «stringing» method, or the cumulative principle, joining each subsequent element to the previous one with the help of the Mother Goose’s recitative lines. She is the key character, who greets and introduces new guests at her party. This principle is refl ected in the organization of the whole operetta. Mother Gooses’ cues are a refrain similar to the poem The House that Jack Built. Each character is not related to the previous one or the next, they are united only by belonging to the images of folk poetry. Since the libretto is mainly based on miniatures (with one or two verses), there are many participants of the performance: 43 characters, 21 thrushes, and collective characters, the number of which is not specifi ed precisely. There is no plot in common sense – as a series of related events built in accordance with certain principles – in The House that Jack Built. Rather, it reminds the carnival procession, in which characters are appearing one by one. They have bright, sometimes extravagant costumes, which vary with the speed of the pattern in the kaleidoscope. The structure of the operetta is simple and clear. It consists of two acts, divided into 19 big numbers (9 in the fi rst action, 10 in the second), which are often built in the form of a suite. The balance among solo-ensemble and choral numbers in The House that Jack Built is unequal. The choruses prevail in the operetta (there are about 20 of them). It is diffi cult to name the exact number because the author does not always clarify the exact cast. Solo and ensemble numbers are 4 times fewer; in addition, there are 2 numbers in the 2d act, in which the soloist and choir sing together. To achieve compositional and dramatic unity, there was a need to involve additional means in addition to the cross-cutting image of Mother Goose, since the Jack’s plot is deprived of the consistent development of events. This function is performed by several themes: «fairy tale» (in the future it is associated with the appearance of fairies and elves), «pastoral» (its emergence is marked by the remark Andante Pastorale), the theme of Jack, the dance motive, and the theme of King Cole. They are exhibited in the overture for the fi rst time. When the act begins, they are joined by the themes of Mother Goose and Thrushes. For the fi rst time, most of the themes are conducted in the overture. This determines the suite character of its structure: 6 episodes that contrast with each other by tempo. The piano part plays an important role in the operetta. It presents the leading themes, the main image-bearing and poetic motives, and supports the performers in the vocal appearances. The revealed signs give grounds to consider the English-language children’s operetta a national model of opera for children-performers. Conclusions. In the English-speaking countries, particularly in the USA, at the end of the 19th – in the fi rst half of the 20th century the tradition to perform operettas at schools was formed. This works from their form and contents were similar to compositions which were called children’s operas (operas for children-performers) in Europe. An analysis of The House that Jack Built by J. L. Gaynor allows us to interpret the author’s genre name in its original linguistic meaning – «small opera». A signifi cant number of such works still remain beyond the attention of scholars and require a thorough study both in historical and in theoretical directions.

Little scholarly attention has been devoted to the dramaturgy of Handel's operas, which seems secondary to musical and circumstantial matters of venue and performers. This article argues that important things can be learned by attempting to categorize, analyze, and assess the librettos in strictly dramaturgical terms. We need to ask whether there is coherence or development, and what Handel wanted in the librettos he set. Handel's operas have generally been categorized by date and/or venue. Winton Dean categorized them by “dominant temper,” characterized as “heroic or dynastic,” “magic operas,” and “antiheroic.” By implication, Handel approached each opera on a case-by-case basis, not much concerned with generic form. Ellen T. Harris critiqued Dean and offered a dialectical model, dividing the operas into “pastoral” and “heroic” groups. But if we ask “What is the ‘source of action’ within each plot?,” we find four largely distinct groups: (1) villain or villainess; (2) intrigue complexities; (3) situational donné; and (4) character display. After nearly fifteen years of plot structures driven by villains, Handel began to experiment with quite different plot designs (though he did not change librettists). Handel's operas comprise, structurally, a series of mostly static scenes in which intense feelings (ambition, lust, hope, fear, doubt, pain, remorse, etc.) are expressed. The happy-ending convention in opera seria renders plot resolution secondary. Handel's operas are essentially situational rather than plot driven. They use dramatic situations over and over (e.g., supplication, deliverance, abduction, remorse, enmity of kinsmen, self-sacrifice). Handel is far more concerned with intense expression of emotion than with telling a story. In all four types of Handelian opera, quasi-ideal heroes or heroines are featured. In (1) they are threatened by the machinations of a villain; in (2) they find themselves entangled in intrigue; in (3) they are caught in the toils of fate or circumstances; and in (4) the aim is mostly just display of heroic character. Handel's bent was for situation and emotion rather than narrative and resolution. Great and stageable as the best of Handel's operas are, the English oratorio offered him a genre ultimately more congenial to his talents and inclinations.

The attitude of the general public and musical circles to the work of Sergei Nikiforovich Vasilenko (1872–1956) changed more than once. Now that it becomes possible to consider his work more objectively, it is attracting the increasing attention of performers and researchers. One of Vasilenko’s most interesting works yet to receive critical reappraisal is his opera Son of the Sun [Sïn Solntsa] (1929). A year after its premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre, the opera was largely forgotten; however, as the present work sets out to demonstrate, this was primarily as a result of political and not artistic factors. Up until now, Son of the Sun has not been the object of detailed musicological analysis. Fortunately, the score, archival materials and critical responses to the production have been preserved. By turning to them, one can reconstruct the atmosphere of its creation to provide this important work with an unbiased assessment and answer the question about the reasons for its unhappy stage fate. The relevance of Son of the Sun today is determined by another circumstance: it is the only Soviet opera whose subject matter is connected with China: the libretto by Mikhail Galperin is based on the events of the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901. As well as drawing on elements of romanticism, impressionism, and modernism, Vasilenko’s music reveals a keen interest in Chinese folklore: in addition to repeatedly quoting themes from Chinese folk music, the composer finds new ways of working with them that correspond to the nature of the material itself. In the musical dramaturgy of the opera, four independent lines can be distinguished: ethnographic, lyrical, revolutionary–ideological and “topical”. In the last of them, the composer comes close to the genre of Zeitoper, which became popular in European musical theatre during the 1920s and 1930s. The study of Vasilenko’s forgotten opera on the eve of its 100th anniversary shows that Son of the Sun has many merits that justify its more thorough study and new attempts to bring it to stage.

The article is focused on certain critical questions of the position of early Italian opera in contemporary culture. For a long time both performers and scholars considered it as an outdated genre meriting only historical interest. This state of affairs began to change in the 1970s, when a series of facsimiles prepared by Garland Publishing revealed a certain number of published opera scores and librettos. Over the past 50 years, three trends have emerged in the scholarly approach to early Italian operas. The first is that of deconstruction of the prevailing and largely erroneous stereotypes. The second is that of reconstruction, filling in the gaps of knowledge (compilation of encyclopedias, catalogues, works on the history of opera, and monographs about composers). The third is that of interpretation of the 17th- and 18th-century European musical and theatrical heritage in the context of culture and style. In this regard, a special position is held by the issue of performance interpretation. The postmodern era has transformed the early opera from an antique rarity into a topical musical and theatrical phenomenon. The dimension has opened up for directorial experiments aimed at projecting this genre onto the topical problems of today, bringing it closer to the perception of the mass of listeners – each and every one. The plotlines based on ancient myths and historical legends, conventional comedic and farcical situations referring to the earliest literary specimens are easily adapted to the realities of the modern theater: one convention becomes replaced by another, the wigs and camisoles of the 18th-century singers are replaced by army camouflage. Most of these productions provide interpretations not so much of the early opera as such, but particularly of us, bringing our own existential fears and ambitions onto the stage, playing on our political sympathies and antipathies. But there also exists an opposite side. It finds expression in the manner of singing and instrumental playing which comes close to the norms of three and four centuries ago, i.e., historical performing practice, which in our conditions is perceived by everyone as exquisite, designed for the refined taste of the elite, and in this sense of the “aristocratic” listener, rather than the general masses. Thus, in many cases there arises a combination, which is paradoxical in its essence – an unreasonable duality. Interpretation of the essence of early Italian opera is becoming acutely relevant as the path for this art to regain its previously lost artistic integrity.

This review essay focuses on the eight-volume book series: Petruzzi Carlo Alberto and Stella Guo Chen, eds. (2021–2023), Precise Word-by-Word Explanation of Italian Opera Librettos in Chinese (8 volumes), as the main subject. Only the most essentail parts are critically investigated. They derive from 1) G. Donizetti and F.Romani, “L'elisir d’amore”; 2) P. Mascagni, G. Targioni-Tozzetti, and G. Menasci, “Cavalleria Rusticana”; R. Leoncavallo, “Pagliacci”; 3) G. Puccini, G. Giacosa, and L. Illica, “La Bohème”; 4) G. Puccini, G. Giacosa, and L. Illica, “Tosca”; 5) G. Verdi and F. M. Piave, “Rigoletto”; 6) G. Verdi and F. M. Piave, “La Traviata”; 7) G. Verdi, S. Cammarano and L. E. Bardare, “Il Trovatore”; and 8) G. Puccini, G. Giacosa, and L. Illica, “Madama Butterfly”.

RESUMENLa presencia del Quijote en los escenarios italianos del XVIII constituye aún un campo parcialmente abonado por la crítica. Las diversas recreaciones cervantinas del período nos hablan de una importante presencia y recepción de temas y motivos en la cultura italiana, siendo estas piezas —no sólo las óperas serias o bufas, sino también las composiciones cómicas breves— verdaderas canteras aún por explorar. En dicha perspectiva se examinan dos intermezzi de clara derivación quijotesca, Don Chisciotte a Venezia (Baretti) y Don Chisciotte nella selva di Alcina (Corsetti), en los que la figura del caballero andante, implantado en ambientes festivos y carnavalescos, es despojada de toda dignidad literaria, al tiempo que se percibe una inversión en la configuración de su perfil moral. Ambas piezas confirman este proceso de apropiación e inversión en el que se plasman nuevas reencarnaciones del famoso hidalgo, recargando las tintas sobre los componentes satíricos y paródicos, a través de un proceso de reelaboración textual en el que la comicidad se desplaza hacia ámbitos decididamente grotescos y caricaturescos.PALABRAS CLAVEQuijote, recreaciones cervantinas, teatro musical, siglo XVIII, Baretti, Corsetti. TITOLOPresenze cervantine negli scenari italiani del Settecento. Baretti e Corsetti: due modelli di appropriazione e inversioneSOMMARIOLa presenza e ricezione del Quijote negli scenari italiani del Settecento costituisce ancora un campo parzialmente affrontato dalla critica. I diversi rifacimenti del periodo per il teatro musicale ci parlano di una importante presenza e ricezione di temi e motivi cervantini nella cultura italiana, essendo questi componimenti —non solo le opere serie o buffe, ma anche i sottogeneri comici e giocosi brevi— vere e proprie miniere da esplorare. In questa prospettiva lo studio esamina due brevi libretti di chiara derivazione chisciottesca, Don Chisciotte a Venezia (Baretti) e Don Chisciotte nella selva di Alcina (Corsetti), in cui la figura del cavalliere errante, inserito in ambienti festivi e carnavaleschi, è spogliata di ogni dignità letteraria, al tempo che si profila un processo di rovesciamento e inversione del suo profilo morale. Questi due intermezzi confermano un singolare processo di appropriazione e di rovesciamento rispetto al romanzo cervantino, in cui si plasmano nuove reincarnazioni del celebre protagonista, enfatizzando gli elementi satirici e parodici attraverso un processo di rielaborazione testuale in cui la comicità si sposta verso contesti decisamente grotteschi.PAROLE CHIAVIDon Chisciotte, rifacimenti cervantini, teatro musicale, Settecento, Baretti, Corsetti.

For more than two decades I had the pleasure and the privilege of working with Kyoko Selden on Japanese texts relating to the history of Italian opera in Japan. We started with translations involving the reception of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and then began working on Takarazuka musical adaptations of the opera. Although administrative duties made it difficult to realize a book project Kyoko's translation of the 1953 Takarazuka Chōchō-san sandaiki (Three-Generation Chōchō-san) furnished me with the basis for a conference presentation, and we eventually collaborated on an English edition of its libretto. That edition was the result of an extensive and—for me—instructive series of revisions and discussions with Kyoko about the intricate relationships between source and target languages. We spent stimulating afternoons over coffee interrogating texts in Italian, Japanese, and English, ultimately working through several complete revisions. Lamentably, that kind of collaboration was less fully realized in the following translation, which we discussed only once. I have edited it here with the generous help of Lili Selden, and revised or added footnotes, in one case deliberately juxtaposing two viewpoints. I believe I also speak for Kyoko in hoping that readers will find it an invitation to continue and refine our dialogue on the transpositions of Italian and Japanese music-dramas into widely different cultural contexts.

Статья посвящена двенадцатитоновым операм, созданным и исполненным в Третьем рейхе: «Михаэль Кольхаас» Пауля фон Кленау и «Жертва» Винфрида Циллига. Вопреки категорическому неприятию Новой музыки, огульной критике атональности как патологически вредного для арийской расы явления ряд двенадцатитоновых сочинений были благосклонно приняты критикой в силу идеологически приемлемого сюжета и квазитональной трактовки додекафонной техники. Они обозначили иной, не шенберговский путь разработки 12-тоновой техники, который стал альтернативой исканиям Шенберга. Датский композитор Пауль фон Кленау (1883–1946) смог обойти политические барьеры и доказать, что его «тонально определенная 12-тоновая музыка» не имеет ничего общего с атональностью. Первоисточником либретто его оперы стала идеологически безупречная новелла немецкого классика Генриха фон Клейста «Михаэль Кольхаас». Двенадцатитоновость в опере оттеняется беспрецедентным обилием чужой музыки: Кленау цитирует хоралы, народные песни, танцы, напев Вальтера фон Фогельвейде и Kyrie из мессы Палестрины “Emendemus”, доминантой стиля и драматургии служит романтизм. Ученик Шенберга Винфрид Циллиг (1905–1963) был партийным функционером в Третьем рейхе. Сюжет его оперы вписывался в рамки идеологии: один из участников экспедиции на Южный полюс жертвует собой ради спасения товарищей. Додекафония в опере также звучит квазитонально: из серии путем трансформаций выводятся тональные гармонические структуры. Одноактная опера Циллига соединяет в себе традиции Шенберга и Стравинского, большая роль хора позволяет ее отнести к жанру хоровой оперы. The article is devoted to the twelve-tone operas created and performed in the Third Reich: “Michael Kohlhaas” by Paul von Klenau and “Das Opfer” by Winfried Zillig. Despite the categorical rejection of New Music, the sweeping criticism of atonality as a pathologically harmful phenomenon for the Aryan race, a number of twelve-tone compositions were favorably received by critics due to the ideologically acceptable plot and quasi-tonal interpretation of the dodecaphone technique. They outlined a different, non-Schoenberg way of developing 12-tone technology, which became an alternative to Schoenberg’s search. The Danish composer Paul von Klenau (1883–1946) was able to bypass ideological barriers and prove that his “tonally defined 12-tone music” has nothing to do with atonality. The original source of the libretto of his opera was the ideologically impeccable novella by the German classic Heinrich von Kleist “Michael Kohlhaas”. The twelve-tone quality in the opera is set off by an unprecedented abundance of foreign music: Klenau quotes chorales, folk songs, dances, the melody of Walter von Vogelweide and Kyrie from Palestrina's mass “Emendemus”, romanticism serves as the dominant style and dramaturgy. Schoenberg's student Winfried Zillig (1905–1963) was a party functionary in the Third Reich. The plot of his opera also fit into the framework of ideology: one of the participants of the expedition to the South Pole sacrifices himself to save his comrades. Dodecaphony in the opera also sounds quasi-tonal: tonal harmonic structures are derived from the series by transformations. Zillig's one-act opera combines the traditions of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the great role of the choir allows it to be attributed to the genre of choral opera.

Статья посвящена изучению оперы репрессированного композитора еврейского происхождения Виктора Ульмана (1898–1944) «Разбитый кувшин», созданной на основе одноименной комедии Генриха фон Клейста. Автор статьи ставит перед собой цель исследовать поэтику оперы «Разбитый кувшин», которая в ряду написанных в 1930–1940-е годы опер-антиутопий — «Падения Антихриста» и «Императора Атлантиды» — кажется отрешенной от трагической действительности интермедией. Возвращение к традициям оперы-буффа с ее характерными чертами — комедийным сюжетом, стремительным развитием действия, ограниченным количеством персонажей (представителей третьего сословия), большой ролью ансамблевых сцен, наличием речитативов, комической трактовкой партии баса — указывает на неоклассические тенденции в творчестве композитора. Жанр предопределил многие особенности произведения: комическое начало, заложенное в либретто (судья должен вынести приговор по собственному преступлению), усилено средствами музыки (звукоизобразительные элементы, жанрово-стилевые контрасты). Необычный комический эффект создает лейтмотив разбитого кувшина (символ совершенного злодеяния), который в драматургии оперы становится своего рода «макгаффином» — незначительным предметом, вокруг которого развивается все действие. В статье также затронут вопрос стилевого диалога, использования в опере цитат из симфонии-кантаты «Песнь о Земле» Г. Малера, которые приобретают смыслообразующее значение в рамках всего творчества Ульмана. Отказ от резкого обличения и сатиры в духе Zeitoper в «Разбитом кувшине» свидетельствует о стремлении композитора освободиться от воли обстоятельств — о стремлении, ставшим для него в концентрационном лагере Терезиенштадт главной движущей силой и стимулом жить и творить вопреки. The article is devoted to the study of the opera “Der Zerbrochne Krug” (“The Broken Jug”), created on the basis of Heinrich von Kleist's comedy of the same name, by a repressed composer of Jewish origin Victor Ullmann (1898–1944). The author aims to explore the poetics of “Der Zerbrochne Krug” which, in the series of anti-utopias written in the 1930s and 1940s — “Der Sturz Des Antichrist” (“The Fall of the Antichrist”) and “Der Kaiser von Atlantis” (“The Emperor of Atlantis”) — looks like a severed interlude from the tragic reality. A return to the traditions of opera buffa with its typical features — the comic plot, the fast-paced action, the limited number of characters (third class), the large role of ensemble scenes, the presence of recitatives, and the comic interpretation of the bass part — all point to the neoclassical tendencies in the composer's work. The genre predetermined many of the work's particular qualities: the comic beginning, embedded in the libretto (the judge must pass sentence on his own crime) is amplified by the means of music (sound figurative elements and genre and stylistic contrasts). An unusual comic effect is created by the leitmotif of the broken jug (a symbol of wickedness), which becomes a kind of “macguffin” in the opera's dramaturgy — a minor object around which the entire action develops. The article also covers the issue of dialogue in style, and the use of quotations from Mahler's “The Song of the Earth” symphonic cantata in the opera, which take on a semantic value throughout Ullmann's oeuvre. The rejection of Zeitoper — like satire in “Der Zerbrochne Krug” indicates the composer's wish to free himself from the will of circumstances, a wish that became his main driving force and incentive to live and create in spite of circumstances in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Объектом внимания в статье является творчество видного представителя русской литературы 1й половины XX века Сергея Митрофановича Городецкого, чей литературный путь начинается в контексте отечественной литературы конца XIX начала XX в., в сложную, противоречивую эпоху, насыщенную драматическими событиями. Имя Городецкого связывается с явлением, получившим название Серебряного века русской литературы. Он один из тех, кто стал неотъемлемой частью богатейшего культурного процесса первых десятилетий прошлого века, давшего миру А. Ахматову, А. Блока, В. Брюсова, К. Бальмонта, Н. Гумилева, М. Волошина, О. Мандельштама, С. Есенина и многих других. Это время творческих исканий и блестящих открытий, переосмысления идей, старых литературных направлений, методов и стилей и формирования новых. Творчество Городецкого занимает достойное место в этом процессе, но не ограничивается рамками Серебряного века . Его долгая творческая жизнь отличается удивительным разнообразием, многогранностью талантов и интересов. Его перу были подвластны поэзия и романная проза, публицистика и драматургия, поэтические переводы и литературоведческие статьи, оперные либретто и рассказы. Природа не обделила Городецкого и художественными способностями в его наследие вошли портретные зарисовки, дружеские шаржи, книжные и журнальные иллюстрации. Особую страницу составила его просветительская и преподавательская деятельность. В статье представлена та часть творчества Городецкого, которая связана с Осетией, ее фольклором, литературой, этнографией, культурным строительством и просвещением и которая осталась в его творческой биографии почти незамеченной. Знакомство Городецкого с Осетией началось с Нартовского эпоса, который оставил значительный след в его наследии. В статье рассмотрен авторизованный перевод нартовской легенды Ацамаз и Агунда , а также цикл очерков СагатИр , опубликованные Городецким в газете Известия в 1926 г. как результат его путешествия по горной Осетии в качестве корреспондента газеты. Цикл отразил не только журналистский дар поэта, но и его интерес к фольклору, этнографии, истории и языку осетин. С Осетией связана еще одна грань творчества Городецкого его перу принадлежит ряд оперных либретто. Одно из них написано на сюжет Нартовского и Даредзановского эпосов. Городецкий в древних эпических сюжетах выразил созвучные его времени идеи свободного труда, преодоления племенной розни, насилия, тяжелого положения женщиныгорянки. Героем оперы становится осетинский Прометей Амран , в ней также присутствуют Ацамаз, Агунда, Курдалагон. Опера Амран была поставлена на сцене Большого театра, а ее либретто было удостоено премии. Городецкий был знаком с осетинскими писателями и поэтами, портретные зарисовки которых, сделанные во время декады осетинского искусства и литературы в Москве, хранятся в фонде С.М. Городецкого в Научном архиве СОИГСИ. Там же находятся рукописные автографы белового и чернового вариантов стихотворения Городецкого Памяти Коста Хетагурова , жизнь и творчество которого вызывали интерес и восхищение русского поэта. В статье также нашла отражение просветительская деятельность Городецкого, связанная с Северной Осетией. The object of attention in the article is the work of the prominent representative of the Russian literature of the 1st half of the 20th century Sergei Gorodetsky, whose literary way begins in the context of Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and into a complex, controversial era, full of dramatic events. Gorodetskys name is associated with the phenomenon known as the Silver Age of the Russian literature. He is one of those who became an integral part of the richest cultural process of the first decades of the last century, alongside with A. Akhmatova, A. Blok, V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, N. Gumilyov, M. Voloshin, O. Mandelstam, S. Yesenin and many others. This is a time of creative searches and brilliant discoveries, reconsidering ideas, old literary trends, methods and styles and the formation of new ones. Gorodetskys work takes significant place in this process, but is not limited to the framework of the Silver Age. His long creative life is remarkable for its amazing diversity, versatility of talents and interests. He was good at poetry and novel prose, journalism and dramaturgy, poetry translations and literary articles, opera librettos and short stories. Нis heritage included portrait sketches, friendly cartoons, book and magazine illustrations. He is also famous for his educational and teaching activities. The article presents that part of S. Gorodetskys work, which is associated with Ossetia, its folklore, literature, ethnography, cultural construction and education, which almost went unnoticed in his creative biography. Gorodetskys acquaintance with Ossetia began with the Narts epic, which left a significant mark on his heritage. The article deals with the authorized translation of the Narts legend Atsamaz and Agunda, as well as the series of essays SagatIr published by S. Gorodetsky in the newspaper Izvestia in 1926 as a result of his travels through mountainous Ossetia as a newspaper correspondent. The cycle reflected not only the journalistic talent of the poet, but also his interest in folklore, ethnography, history and the language of the Ossetians. Another aspect of Gorodetskys work connected with Ossetia is number of opera librettos. One of them is based on the plot of the Narts and Daredzan epics. Gorodetsky expressed the ideas of his time: free labour, overcoming tribal hatred, violence, and the plight of female highlanders in ancient epic plots. The Ossetian Prometheus Amran becomes the hero of the opera Atsamaz, Agunda, and Kurdalagon also taking part in it. The opera was staged at the Bolshoi Theater, and its libretto received an award. Gorodetsky was familiar with Ossetian writers and poets, whose portrait sketches, made during the decade of Ossetian art and literature in Moscow, are stored in the S. Gorodetsky collection in the Scientific Archive of the Institute for Humanitarian and Social Studies. There are manuscript autographs of Gorodetskys poem In Memoriam of KostaKhetagurov, whose life and work the Russian poetadmired. The article also reviews the educational activities of S. Gorodetsky related to North Ossetia.

The article talks about the great discovery of mankind – music and the incomparable role of opera art in it, the national approach in the Uzbek opera, national features reflected in its melodic range and performing directions. It highlights the development of the opera genre, its trends in the&nbsp;21st century, new aspects and forms, examples of national operas, and the great creative potential of our country's composers<strong>.</strong>

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas:&#x0D; &#x0D; dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15).&#x0D; &#x0D; But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature.&#x0D; &#x0D; Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). &#x0D; &#x0D; But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation.&#x0D; &#x0D; What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art.&#x0D; &#x0D; Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam:&#x0D; &#x0D; Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle.&#x0D; &#x0D; When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.)&#x0D; &#x0D; Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. &#x0D; &#x0D; Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”).&#x0D; &#x0D; What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. &#x0D; &#x0D; What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks:&#x0D; &#x0D; There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; A few pages later the narrator will tell us:&#x0D; &#x0D; At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge.&#x0D; &#x0D; Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry:&#x0D; &#x0D; Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: &#x0D; &#x0D; Dublin, 1904&#x0D; Trieste, 1914&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power.&#x0D; &#x0D; Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy.&#x0D; &#x0D; I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn)&#x0D; &#x0D; Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature.&#x0D; &#x0D; Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey:&#x0D; &#x0D; I was black but comely. Don’t glance&#x0D; Upon me. This flesh is crumbling&#x0D; Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied&#x0D; Carrion. Assassinated.&#x0D; Screams of mucking juncos scrawled&#x0D; Over the chapel and my nerves,&#x0D; A stickiness, as when he finished&#x0D; Maculating my thighs and dress.&#x0D; My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors&#x0D; Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling.&#x0D; Suddenly I would like poison.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp.&#x0D; Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning.&#x0D; I can see lice swarming the air.&#x0D; …&#x0D; His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed&#x0D; My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension.&#x0D; &#x0D; I was black but comely. Don’t look&#x0D; Upon me: this flesh is dying.&#x0D; I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion,&#x0D; My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping&#x0D; With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors &#x0D; Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling,&#x0D; Crumbling like proved lies.&#x0D; His scythe went shick shick shick and cut &#x0D; My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14).&#x0D; &#x0D; I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder.&#x0D; &#x0D; Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14).&#x0D; &#x0D; Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento.&#x0D; &#x0D; I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign.&#x0D; &#x0D; References&#x0D; &#x0D; Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Citation reference for this article&#x0D; &#x0D; MLA Style&#x0D; Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php&gt;. APA Style&#x0D; Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php&gt;. &#x0D;

This paper examines a series of drammi per musica written by Adriano Morselli during the last years of his own career as librettist for the Teatro di S. Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice: Amulio e Numitore (1689), Pirro e Demetrio (1690) and L’incoronazione di Serse (1691), with music by Giuseppe Felice Tosi; La pace fra Tolomeo e Seleuco (1691) and L’Ibraim sultano (1692), with music by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo. Investigating a series of topoi and dramaturgical devices that place this works in the wake of the writing conventions of late seventeenth-century Venetian opera, the paper takes into consideration the dramatic models employed by the poet, with their direct influences from the classical French theatre. This allows us to consider Morselli’s libretti as an example of a poetic trend, only partially studied by theatrologists and musicologists, which flourished in Venetian opera during the last quarter of the 17th century.

RESUMENLa presencia del Quijote en los escenarios italianos del XVIII constituye aún un campo parcialmente abonado por la crítica. Las diversas recreaciones cervantinas del período nos hablan de una importante presencia y recepción de temas y motivos en la cultura italiana, siendo estas piezas —no sólo las óperas serias o bufas, sino también las composiciones cómicas breves— verdaderas canteras aún por explorar. En dicha perspectiva se examinan dos intermezzi de clara derivación quijotesca, Don Chisciotte a Venezia (Baretti) y Don Chisciotte nella selva di Alcina (Corsetti), en los que la figura del caballero andante, implantado en ambientes festivos y carnavalescos, es despojada de toda dignidad literaria, al tiempo que se percibe una inversión en la configuración de su perfil moral. Ambas piezas confirman este proceso de apropiación e inversión en el que se plasman nuevas reencarnaciones del famoso hidalgo, recargando las tintas sobre los componentes satíricos y paródicos, a través de un proceso de reelaboración textual en el que la comicidad se desplaza hacia ámbitos decididamente grotescos y caricaturescos.PALABRAS CLAVEQuijote, recreaciones cervantinas, teatro musical, siglo XVIII, Baretti, Corsetti. TITOLOPresenze cervantine negli scenari italiani del Settecento. Baretti e Corsetti: due modelli di appropriazione e inversioneSOMMARIOLa presenza e ricezione del Quijote negli scenari italiani del Settecento costituisce ancora un campo parzialmente affrontato dalla critica. I diversi rifacimenti del periodo per il teatro musicale ci parlano di una importante presenza e ricezione di temi e motivi cervantini nella cultura italiana, essendo questi componimenti —non solo le opere serie o buffe, ma anche i sottogeneri comici e giocosi brevi— vere e proprie miniere da esplorare. In questa prospettiva lo studio esamina due brevi libretti di chiara derivazione chisciottesca, Don Chisciotte a Venezia (Baretti) e Don Chisciotte nella selva di Alcina (Corsetti), in cui la figura del cavalliere errante, inserito in ambienti festivi e carnavaleschi, è spogliata di ogni dignità letteraria, al tempo che si profila un processo di rovesciamento e inversione del suo profilo morale. Questi due intermezzi confermano un singolare processo di appropriazione e di rovesciamento rispetto al romanzo cervantino, in cui si plasmano nuove reincarnazioni del celebre protagonista, enfatizzando gli elementi satirici e parodici attraverso un processo di rielaborazione testuale in cui la comicità si sposta verso contesti decisamente grotteschi.PAROLE CHIAVIDon Chisciotte, rifacimenti cervantini, teatro musicale, Settecento, Baretti, Corsetti.